Before speaking of dignity lost with Lovaglio, we should have the courage to look at the numbers of what happened before.

In 2007, the Bank had a market capitalisation of 9 billion euros, closed that year’s accounts with a net profit of 1 billion and 437 million euros. The Foundation held assets valued at between 9 and 10 billion euros. Siena was the wealthiest city in Italy, with the Foundation’s disbursements funding schools, theatre, the Palio, the university, Santa Maria della Scala — everything.

Then came 8 November 2007. Mussari wanted Antonveneta and took it sight unseen. Independent reviewers had valued the Paduan bank at 6.6 billion euros. The Spanish group managed to sell it to MPS at a heavily inflated price, pocketing a gain of 2.4 billion. That was not all: on top of the 9.3 billion paid to acquire Antonveneta, MPS had to take on approximately 7 billion in guarantees on ABN Amro’s debt. Seventeen billion in total. The acquisition was made without any due diligence on a bank that Banco Santander had itself purchased only months earlier for 6.6 billion — a staggering return of nearly 54% in a matter of weeks for the Spanish bank.

The final bill: more than ten billion euros in capital increases gone up in smoke, the first round of State aid worth 4 billion (repaid with nearly a billion in interest), a bank rescued from collapse by the Treasury at a cost of 8 billion, the Foundation virtually wiped out with its assets collapsing from 6 billion to barely 500 million euros. Thousands of people out of work. An impoverished territory.

What brought MPS down was not Antonveneta alone. A reckless lending strategy accumulated 27 billion euros in non-performing loans over just a few years, with more than 56% of exposures exceeding one million euros: a credit policy skewed heavily in favour of the largest clients, not the small businesses of the region.

And then the derivatives: Alexandria with Nomura, Santorini with Deutsche Bank — instruments built to conceal the losses arising from the acquisition and spread them across a longer time horizon. The “mandate agreement” governing Alexandria was found locked in a sixteenth-century Safe in the former office of director general Vigni. That discovery was the stone that triggered the avalanche of trials in Siena and Milan.

The judicial epilogue is perhaps the most disquieting chapter of all. In November 2019, the Milan Tribunal sentenced Mussari to seven and a half years in prison for market manipulation, false accounting, false prospectus, and obstruction of the supervisory authorities. In May 2022, the Court of Appeal overturned the verdict entirely. The Court of Cassation confirmed the acquittal in October 2023.

The trials established that Mussari and Vigni committed no criminal offence. But — and this is where the reasoning becomes truly uncomfortable — to call them merely reckless would require that they had squandered their own fortunes, not those accumulated by an entire community over more than five centuries of banking.

This is what truly stings. Not the criminal charges — the judges have spoken. But the political and moral responsibility of those who pursued strategic decisions wildly disproportionate to the institution’s actual strength, while the public chorus fell silent or applauded — with rare exceptions that the city has preferred not to remember.

Siena has applied the same structural amnesia in both directions: it never said “fault” to those who drove the bank to the edge of collapse, and now it cannot say “thank you” to the man who brought it back. This is not ingratitude. It is the symptom of a city that delegated its own identity to a credit institution, and that when that institution entered crisis found no words of its own to describe what had happened.

The real collapse was not financial. It was the collapse of a ruling class that could not — or would not — see what was happening in front of it. And that today, faced with Lovaglio, repeats the same pattern: celebration without scrutiny, silence without reckoning.

A city does not recover its dignity by learning to say thank you. It recovers it by learning to say what really happened.

Sources

¹ Il Sole 24 Ore, “La Caporetto Montepaschi 2008: bruciati 23,5 miliardi”, 4 August 2021

² AGI, “Da Antonveneta ad Alexandria, perché Mps è nei guai”, 23 December 2016

³ Il Fatto Quotidiano, “Mps-Antonveneta, Mussari spese nove miliardi soltanto con una telefonata”, 24 August 2013

⁴ Il Post, “Che succede a MPS, in otto punti”, 1 November 2014

⁵ La Nazione, “Mps, processi e sentenze. La lunga stagione di crisi tra Vasa, Ustica e Cipolla”, 22 October 2023

⁶ MilanoFinanza, “Mps, colpo di scena: la Cassazione conferma l’assoluzione di Mussari e Vigni”, 11 October 2023

⁷ Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, Relazione della Commissione d’inchiesta sulla Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena, public record

⁸ Pierluigi Piccini, “Mps. Un buco finanziario di 35 miliardi di euro, causato da cosa? Antonveneta? Strategia creditizia?”, pierluigipiccini.it, October 2023

⁹ Wikipedia, entries Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and Giuseppe Mussari, for chronological summary data